People like to bandy around the term “walled garden.” Apple is a walled garden, Amazon is a walled garden – any company that restricts how a user or developer can interact with its product is immediately tarred with the evil! paranoid! closed-minded! brush.

Squarespace, a blogging engine that was updated to version six a few months ago, was a prime example. Unlike open-source rivals like WordPress or Drupal, Squarespace restricted developers to a small portion of the system’s underlying code. Now though, the company has removed those restrictions with a public beta of its Developer Platform, Squarespace’s first attempt at melding its Apple-like product philosophy with the let a thousand features bloom approach of Android.

Developers can access the platform for free, allowing them to kick the tires and figure out if this new-fangled freedom is all it’s cracked up to be. Squarespace has bundled a number of goodies – such as the LESS stylesheet language (see: the thing that makes Web pages look like something more than Times New Roman on a white background) and the Git versioning system – and the ability to use any code libraries that take a developer’s fancy.

Jason Barone, a developer who uses Squarespace for all of his projects, welcomes the launch of the Developer Platform with open arms. He says that the new tools allow him to combine Squarespace’s ease of use with the openness of WordPress.org or other content management systems. Squarespace version 5 had some problems, he said, but Squarespace 6 “lays a foundation to solve all of these issues plus more, while innovating with incredible creative tools for building websites.”

As someone that spends most of his time in WordPress and used to use Squarespace for a personal blog, I’m inclined to agree with Barone’s assessment. Even though my blogging needs were relatively simple, Squarespace version 5 felt claustrophobic at times. Squarespace 6 seems to solve many of those issues, and, in my opinion, has a better user experience than WordPress or a handful of other blogging systems (Tumblr, Posterous, etc.) I’ve tried. (Full disclosure: I have begged Sarah to move PandoDaily over to Squarespace multiple times in the past. So far it’s a non-starter.)

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Samsung has announced Samsung Pay, a competitor to the Apple Pay product included in Apple’s latest iPhones, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The feature will allow new Samsung Galaxy S6 owners who use MasterCard to pay for goods with their phones. It’s not clear when other credit card companies will be supported. [Source: The Guardian]